Opinion

•We have heard that a status report on the fire department pornography investigation will come out within a couple of weeks.
•Well-known Los Alamos figure Ed Burkle has been nominated by Gov.-elect Susana Martinez to serve as her secretary of the General Services Department.
•We have learned that Dr. Ann Wadstrom submitted the winning suggestion, which resulted in the name change of Airport Basin to Pajarito Cliffs.

You can’t accuse anybody of exploiting the world-famous church in Las Trampas for gain.
In front of the church is a dirt parking area, and across the way is a small, funky shop, with “La Tienda” painted by hand over the doorway, where you can find modestly priced pottery, odd-looking wood sculptures that are a Pueblo version of kachina figures, and cold drinks that you can serve yourself from an old refrigerator.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. One of the reasons is that Americans still remember why we celebrate it.
Thanksgiving isn’t just another holiday, to which we give not one thought other than that it is a day off work.
Nearly all of us truly remember to give thanks and truly celebrate the holiday.
Unlike Christmas, there is no stress around giving and receiving presents. The purpose of celebrating Thanksgiving is very simple and very easy to observe.

Ready for some Thanksgiving quotes? I don’t mean the “I’m thankful for my Nintendo Wii” or the “I’m thankful for my new car” quotes that we hear all too often lately. I mean some real Thanksgiving quotes that remind us of what we really have to be thankful for.
Here are 10 Thanksgiving quotes to celebrate and ponder:
•“The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts. No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.” —H.U. Westermayer

This intangible thing we call freedom is interpreted differently by just about every individual, but one aspect that’s not open for debate is that we enjoy freedom because of the sacrifices made by countless men and women of our armed forces. We must never question that freedom is worth fighting for, and dying for. That very concept was the genesis of the United States of America.

Some amount of stress is inevitable in life and positive stress can also be helpful to thrive in life. But uncontrollable stress is the major concern that may cause harm. When you feel stressed, your body always reacts to it. As medically proven, long term stress damages your body seriously and causes various chronic ailments.

My favorite epoch in Earth history is the Ice Age, the time in which saber tooth tigers and giant mastodons roamed the world. The Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago when – quite abruptly – the bitter temperatures of the time gave way to our present, balmy epoch.
Natural history museums often have the skeletal remains of Ice Age mammals. They are enough to inspire awe in part because many of the species alive during that time were much bigger than modern animals. The Ice Age was a time of giant deer and moose, with a species of beaver as large as a modern black bear.

I recently posed the following two questions to all seven county council candidates and made them aware that I would be making their responses public.
•Do you plan to vote yes or no on the Hannemann mail-in initiative to build a replica of the old Municipal Building on Ashley Pond Park?
•What is your stand on this initiative?
Following is a synopsis of the candidate’s responses in the order that I received them:

After the recent League of Women Voters Forum, I spoke with Gary Ahlers, Republican candidate for magistrate judge. I want to thank him for agreeing to publish the whole and complete public record of all his felony and misconduct charges, including the disposition of every charge, on his Web site (www.garyahlers.com) by Sunday. He thanked me for the suggestion.

Now the fun part begins. Former state Rep. John Mershon of Alamogordo isn’t with us anymore but that’s what the conservative finance chairman would say right now as state lawmakers begin to wrestle with devastating budget cuts.
Two years ago lawmakers implemented the easy cuts, raiding our hefty reserves, removing unused money from capital outlay projects and searching out hidden slush funds throughout state government.
Last year, it got more serious.
A hiring freeze began reducing the number of state employees.

Self Help Inc, a locally-based non-profit dedicated to assisting those residing in Northern New Mexico since 1969 has up to $1000 “seed money” available to individuals and small businesses seeking skill improvement, equipment and resources to further their businesses and enhance financial self-reliance.

Editor’s note: What Pawlak calls censorship, we call editing for good taste. Like all newspapers, we reserve the right to edit and to decline to print anything we deem unfit for a family newspaper of general circulation. He said he sent the same column to the New Mexican. They also said they would not print it. He gets to argue his case here.

Censoring has been going on ever since written language was invented. You think those scratches over cave paintings are a coincidence?

I just want to thank the various people in Los Alamos — including the acting film liaison — who have helped move along a feature-length documentary project I have been shooting key parts of in Los Alamos.

And I hope to shoot a few more as the project wraps up.

Los Alamos is an extraordinarily beautiful place, rich in history.

And seems to me to be a bit under-utilized in terms of film location work.

The term “Superfund site” makes few of us think first of a dry cleaners. Yet nationwide, plain old dry cleaning fluid is a common and costly threat to groundwater, including by the Rio Grande 20 miles north of Los Alamos.

In today’s rapidly evolving media landscape, news and information products constantly have to be evaluated, changed, updated, and, in some cases, abandoned.

Why? Because the needs of readers are changing just as rapidly; a product that was highly read and utilized just a year or two ago, can become passé with a relatively minor advance in technology or a common shift in reader behavior.

The Los Alamos Monitor is engaged in just such an evaluation with our weekly entertainment/TV listings publication, Kaleidoscope.

Our county council chambers are emblazoned with a quotation attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.”

During the last two years, I have served as chair of the White Rock Master Plan Implementation Committee. Prior to that, I served on the steering committee that assisted MIC with their master plan study for the White Rock community center.

However, I write today as a private individual, not as a member of the WRMPIC.